Whether you call it the Telephone Game or Chinese Whispers, it has to be one of the favorite games that we played as kids. The thrill of hearing a completely different phrase than the original one made the game so much fun. Google’s Pamela Fox has taken this popular game to an automated online version using the Google Translate API and created a social experience that is bound to keep you trying some phrases just for the hilarious output produced at times.
The popular location-based social service Foursquare hosted its first hackathon on saturday at the tech incubator General Assembly in New York City. The event attracted over a hundred developers who used the Foursquare API to produce almost 40 apps to show off and enter into competition.
Mobile Application Developers are a wanted lot. AT&T has announced its annual mobile application contest and is inviting developers to submit and win a chance for prize money and an opportunity to get your application across on AT&T Network, which has a subscriber base of 95 million customers.
Potentially no industry was impacted as much as real estate by mapping APIs. Over five years later, it takes more than pins on a slippy map to create a useful real estate mashup. The three below are worth noting because each uses a different platform: web, WordPress and Android. Of course, we know our directory of 229 real estate mashups doesn’t cover everything. Get the word out and add a mashup.
Google continues to push away at improving its platform-as-a-service offering, the Google App Engine API. It has already seen two minor releases this year with the latest release bringing in much needed updates to the XMPP and Task Queue APIs. An earlier release in the year focused on the High Replication Datastore, that was clearly targeted to mission critical applications.
This week we had 41 new APIs added to our API directory including SMS and voicemail management service, a url shortener and monetizing service, live internet radio platform, and email marketing service. We also covered Sunlight Labs’ real-time politics API, which provides information on votes in the United States congress. Below is more detail on each of these 41 new APIs.
This past week 25 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 36 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include AgentRank, Amazon RDS Relational Database Service, Burstn, Facebook Social Plugins, Foxrate, Google Gmail OAuth, Google Prediction, Instapaper, Loxcel, PicPlz, Quora, SendGrid, Snapr and Twitter Streaming. The most often used APIs this week are Google Maps, Twilio and Twilio SMS. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Social (5 APIs, 5 mashups), Mapping (4 APIs, 9 mashups) and Database (3 APIs, 4 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
As more companies open up their data and provide API access to connect to developers, possibilities continue to arise for community service and non-profits. The World Bank is one such organization, with its World Bank API and recent challenge to solve real world problems. That contest is now over, but the public voting period continues.
Filmaster, a project started by two Polish movie addicts in 2008 has made moves that could catapult them into the big marquee. Filmaster takes it one step further than movie databases like IMDB and movie recommendation engines like Mombo by combining movies and recommendation with a complete community-based social experience. And to support all this, it has a website, mobile applications and a Filmaster API to fuel further adoption.
We’ve covered Factual a number of times, most recently asking if it will become the go-to location database. Now the company has expanded its offering with improved datasets, new datasets and a new iPhone SDK. Its local data now covers 27 countries and contains more than 30 million individual business listings.
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